Line

(Another rerun post that people using search engines seem to like, this one from October 2008. Although I hint at the end that I might follow up, I never really did. There's definitely a lot more to be said, and I'm more conscious than I was even two years ago that there are many valid perspectives on the subject. This isn't meant to be the right approach or only approach, just mine.)
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It's easy to talk about "line" in drawing without ever really defining it. It's a vague and slippery arty-farty term that can make you sound smart without really pinning you down. "His work has such an expressive line!" Well ... who can argue with that? But what, if anything, does it mean? This post takes a stab at describing what I mean when I look at, judge, and draw a line.

I remember clearly the moment I first got the concept of line. It was a college life-drawing class, when the instructor showed us a cartoon by Michelangelo with everything in the image obscured except one line that ran from a figure's hip to its ankle. (Originally, a "cartoon" was a sketch an artist did in preparation for a painting and is the sort of cartoon I mean, although it is cheeky fun to refer to giants like Mike as "cartoonists." Technically true.) This ochre scribble had form and mass. It carried weight and seemed to twist in and out of the page. When you really looked at it, it was astonishingly graceful and expressive. And it was just a single line! Somewhere in my hippocampus, a penny dropped.

Cartoonists traditionally (that is, pre-digitally) draw their lines in pencil first, then go over them with ink pens or brushes to make them black. Many (probably most) artists like their pencils better than their inks, finding the preliminary work more spontaneous and lively. That's not true for me. I never feel like one of my drawings comes to life until I've inked it, and I think the quality of line and the tools I draw it with make the difference. Those tools are a fine sable or sable-synthetic brush and a variety of nibs, usually crow-quill.

The lines above were made by (top to bottom) a brush, a stiff crow-quill nib, and a more flexible crow-quill nib. I make them thick or thin just by pressing harder or lighter as I draw. I can use these different line weights in a few ways: first, to indicate light and shadow; second, to suggest mass; third and more subtly, to represent something I'm not sure what to call but the best word I can think of is "tension."

Light and shadow are obvious. Lines facing toward the light are thin and those facing away are thick. Usually, light comes from overhead so lines defining the undersides or bottoms of things should be heavier. Mass is also obvious: heavy objects take thicker, bulkier, rougher lines than light ones. Anvils and clouds demand different line weights. Then there's "tension," by which I mean I make my lines thinner where an object is stretched or tight, and thicker where it's loose or full. It's easier to show what I mean with a quick example:

In this drawing, light's coming from above. My line is thinnest at the crown of the head both because it's nearest the light and the skin stretches tight and thin against the skull. In fact, it's so thin the line actually disappears for a bit. Ditto for the bridge of the nose: it's facing the light and the skin is taut. The line is thicker under the nose and lower lip, where shadows fall, and along the jawline, which is both farthest from the light and fleshier. However, it's thinner on the chin itself because the skin is firmer there. The lines defining the sides of the head gradually widen from top to bottom, indicating the transition from light to shadow and also the fact that the face gets looser toward the bottom. This is a slightly saggy middle-aged person; if I wanted to draw a teenager, I'd keep the line lighter toward the bottom because the skin is tighter.

Here's just another quick example showing two identically sized boxes, except the one on the left is hollow cardboard while the one on the right is solid concrete:

Obviously, the heavier object has a heavier line. Another difference between these cubes is that on the cardboard box the line weight is the same from top to bottom, while on the concrete cube the lines thicken from top to bottom. This implies that the bottom of the concrete cube is carrying a lot of weight, more and more as you approach the floor, while the cardboard box is light as a feather. I exaggerate this effect by widening the sides and rounding the corners of the concrete cube as if it were bulging under its own mass, while conversely narrowing the sides and sharpening the corners of the cardboard box as it it were holding itself up with no trouble at all.

I'm not sure how conscious I am of this stuff when I'm inking. It seems like a lot to think about! I know I always start with an awareness of where the light is coming from. The rest just seems to flow. I recall seeing a video of Charles Schulz teaching a cartooning class in the mid-1970s in which he told the students, "when you draw grass, think of grass." I don't mean to get too mystical mumbo-jumbo about it, but I think that's how it works. When I'm drawing cardboard or concrete I think "cardboard" or "concrete," and my brain-hand combo seems to do the rest.

Application, with a Bonus Rant
Now, in addition to thinking about and applying this stuff, you've got to simplify it. Cartooning is distillation, stripping a drawing down to the essential infomation needed to communicate. That's the toughest for me, and where I struggle the most. It's so much harder to draw something with two lines than twenty! I think this aspect of cartooning makes the line even more important as it's tasked with conveying more and more information. An inky squiggle can be a blade of grass, a coyote falling off a cliff, or a brick zipping past at the speed of sound. Only the skill of the cartoonist and the mind of the reader who comprehends the symbols and fills in the missing details gives the squiggle meaning.

What dismays and frustrates me is how few contemporary cartoonists seem to think about this stuff, or even be aware that they can or should think about this stuff. Fifty years ago, this is what professionals did. Understanding line was the bare minimum required to get into the club. Milt Caniff was a hugely influential giant to two or three generations of cartoonists not because "Terry and the Pirates" and "Steve Canyon" were swell comic strips but because he was a master of line. Same with Roy Crane, Walt Kelly, Wally Wood, or any of forty or fifty other greats I could list.
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"Steve Canyon" by Milt Caniff. If I had 1%
of his ink-line mojo, I could die happy.

Without naming names or pointing fingers, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

It's tempting to pin the death of skillful linework on the rise of digital art--and I think poorly done digital art does have a bland, sterile coldness to it--but in fact some cartoonists (e.g., Darrin Bell) produce very lively lines on the computer. You just have to work at it. But in order to work at it, you have to realize it's worth knowing and doing in the first place. Unfortunately, I fear the art of cartooning has eroded to a state where many of its practitioners don't even know what they don't know. I'm far (way far) from an expert at any of this; the more I learn, the more I realize how ignorant I am. But I'm trying.

Cartooning is hard enough as it is. We've got a hundred years' worth of tools to do the job, many of them hand-forged and left for us by master craftsmen in decades past. Why anyone would toss out and neglect those tools until all they have left in the toolbox is a cracked hammer and bent screwdriver is beyond me.

UPDATE: Re-reading the next day, I realize a lot more could be said about line. This wasn't intended to be comprehensive, just a first stab. In addition to the few variations I described, lines can be bold, tentative, coarse, tremulous, precise, Impressionistic. Each affects the reader. An artist's line can become their signature: the smooth elegance of Al Hirschfeld or nervous scritchiness of Ed Koren are instantly recognizable. Lack of a lively line can also be a style choice. For example, "Dilbert" and "Pearls Before Swine" use very uniform lines that reinforce the bleakness of their universes. Whether or not Scott Adams and Stephan Pastis made that choice deliberately, I think it works for them.
There's a lot to think about. Maybe more later.
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How Did I Miss This?!

Interrupting the reruns to celebrate the best literary news I've heard in a long time: the autobiography of Mark Twain is about to be published 100 years after his death, as directed in his will. I love Twain's work, consider myself a fan, but never heard of this autobiography (except as a failed project) or his strange stipulation. Apparently he wanted to speak his mind without hurting anyone's feelings or sullying his reputation. According to this article, while scholars have had access to the work and bits have been published before, more than half of the 5000 pages have never seen print.

I'll anticipate this eagerly. Will Twain, the quintessential American writer, delve into politics, race, art, literature? Will his frank opinions seem enlighted beyond their years or relics of old prejudices? Or, as some speculate, will they just be the bitter ramblings of an angry, dying old man?

Regardless, I love the idea of Twain becoming a literary celebrity in the 21st century, just as he was in the 19th and 20th. At this writing, pre-orders on Amazon have boosted the book's rank to #368 (that's high!), and it's not out until November. What a kick it would be to see the name "Twain" sitting atop the bestseller lists in 2010-2011.
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How I Cartoon

(This post is a rerun from November 2005, when Mom's Cancer was at the printer and a few months from its debut. My cartooning technique hasn't changed a lot since I originally wrote this. I use non-photo blue pencil now instead of regular graphite--I always alternated between the two, and prefer to use blue because I don't have to erase it. I don't letter by hand on the originals anymore, and I'm much more facile with Photoshop these days. But this remains a valid "how to," especially the conclusion. "Bird by bird.")
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All quiet on the literary front. As far as I know, printers in Asia are churning away, chunkity-chunking out copies of Mom's Cancer while I sleep peacefully through the night half a world away. I look forward to getting one in my hands. Meanwhile...

On my main site, I used to have a "How To" page describing how I drew Mom's Cancer. I took it down after a while--don't remember why, maybe it occurred to me that no one cared. But what is a blog if not a repository for material about which no one but its author might care?

My method is very "old-school" cartooning, with a bit of computerization thrown in at the end. Increasing numbers of cartoonists work entirely on computer and love the results. I haven't yet found a technology that gives me the same versatility and control I enjoy with a brush. Plus, for me, the act of putting pencil and ink on paper is the most satisfying part. Why would I want to give it up? In some circles, this makes me a dinosaur.

I begin with a script and a blank sheet of 9-by-12-inch 2-ply vellum bristol board. Following a rough thumbnail sketch on scratch paper, I rule in borders and lettering guides in light pencil, then rough in the captions and word balloons:


The words go first because it's critical that they have enough room and the eye follows them around the page as intended. Then I pencil the art. It's still pretty loose at this point:

I rule borders and other straight lines using a fountain pen, and letter with waterproof black India ink using Speedball nibs B-6 and B-5 (for bold).

Art is also inked with black India ink using a variety of small sable or synthetic brushes. Fine details and lines (like those on Mom's shirt or the pattern on her hat) are done with a crow-quill nib.

After erasing pencil lines with a kneaded eraser, I scan the art into Photoshop to add shading and any color needed. I also do a fair amount of editing at this stage...fixing mistakes, erasing blemishes, and sometimes rewriting entire bits of dialogue by cutting and pasting words or even individual letters. A few years ago, this would've been done with X-Acto knives, rubber cement and White Out. Computers are much better.

When I had the time to sit down and work non-stop, I could finish two or three pages per day. However, I very rarely got such time and did the best I could, when I could. The hardest part? Laying down Line One on Day One, knowing that I had more than 100 pages and many months to go. Anne Lamott tells a story about her 10-year-old brother struggling to complete a huge report on birds the night before it was due. Overwhelmed and immobilized, he asked his father how he could possibly get it done. Dad answered, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." That's how I did Mom's Cancer: bird by bird.

Roots

(This post, a rerun originally posted in my old blog in June 2008, is a favorite of mine.)
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Many people who aren't from California and have seen too much "Baywatch" are surprised by how agricultural the state is. California's Central Valley is some of the most productive farmland in the nation, and there are small towns a hundred miles from Los Angeles or San Francisco that are as rural as any you'd find in the deepest backwaters of South Dakota (and I pick on South Dakota because I love it). My father-in-law grew up in such a farm town, and it was to that town that Karen and I drove last weekend to attend the wedding of a friend's son.

We arrived several hours early because we wanted to check out a few things and meet Karen's sister and her family for lunch. The town had maybe 2500 people when my father-in-law was a boy working in his father's appliance store, but because it lies on a big highway and is within commuting distance of the Bay Area (it's a two-hour drive each way but some crazy people do it), it's grown to about 25,000. The highway is now lined with a Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target and the like, which has destroyed the old downtown district three blocks away. Half the storefronts are deserted, the other half you wouldn't necessarily want to go into, but it still retains the architectural bones and charm of its early 20th-century origin. You think, "man, they'd really have something great here if they could just turn it around," but they probably won't and it'll all crumble away and that's the way of things these days.

After lunch, we all went to the local two-room museum because we'd heard there might be something of particular interest to us there. The "open" sign was up but the door was locked and we walked around puzzled, finally finding an unlocked side door that we obviously weren't meant to go through. But it had a bell on it, and we'd just begun to walk away when an 80ish docent poked his head through the door and beckoned us around to the front. He works in the back, you see, and gets so few visitors that it's easier for him to lock the front door and listen for the jingle.

The museum had a genuinely interesting collection of artifacts spanning the town's pioneering days through World War II. It also had what we'd come to see: a poster-sized photo of Karen's father at age 9, standing with his father (Karen's grandfather) in front of the appliance store with two workers, proudly displaying the latest mid-1940s models of Maytag washers. We took some pictures of the picture, which the docent was happy to place on an easel for us, and were talking with the old man when he asked Karen, "Say, whatever happened to your grandfather's rock collection?" Karen replied that her father still has most of it, and we walked away amazed and delighted that this really once was a town where everyone knew everyone else and there were still people sixty years later who remembered when ol' Frank had the best rock collection around.

We were reminded again at our next stop, the town's one antique shop. Like a lot of businesses, my grandfather-in-law's appliance store used to give away things with its name printed on them: calendars, can openers, dolls. A few survive in the family; we figured if we ever had the slightest chance of finding more it would be at the local antique shop. No luck, but we did discover the 90-year-old owner, a woman who'd lived there 70 years and clearly intended to end her days surrounded by stacks of mostly junk. She was a real sweetheart. When we explained who Karen was and what we were looking for, she said, "Oh yes, Frank the electric man! He was so nice!" She told us a few stories about the way the town used to be and how it isn't like that anymore. She's been robbed a couple of times recently--see where they damaged the drawer of the antique cash register with a crowbar?--and when we expressed amazement that she actually kept cash in the old thing, she taught my wife the trick to getting it open. Fortunately, her trust was not misplaced.

It became an unxpectedly heartwarming weekend for us, thanks to a museum volunteer and an antiques dealer who couldn't have been happier to meet my wife--Frank's granddaughter and little Bobby's daughter--and made us a bit homesick for a home we never had.

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How I Approach Cartooning

(This post is a rerun from September 2008, combining two posts I wrote on "How I Approach Cartooning" that seemed to be pretty well received.)
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"I have made this letter longer than usual,
because I lack the time to make it short."

--Blaise Pascal

I tend to overwrite. I learned that about myself a long time ago--probably in my first real job out of college as a reporter for a small daily newspaper--and also learned to use it to my advantage. I made it part of my writing process. For example, when I write a first draft and check my word count, I'm very happy if it comes out 10% to 20% over. I know I can go through it a few times, tighten it up, release some gas, and polish it into a nice lean piece that clearly says what it needs to and nothing else. That's my goal.

I have a friend who wrote a novel. When he finished and started showing it to agents, they told him it was too long to be marketable in his genre. He'd have to cut it by a quarter. This seemed a daunting, despairing task: go through and slice out every fourth word? Impossible! His finely drawn characters would become caricatures, his carefully balanced plot would fall apart. Yet he did it, and when he finished cutting he was amazed how much it'd improved his book. Yes, he'd lost some favorite bits, but the novel had a new flow and energy that made it a better story.

Cartooning is that to an extreme. Back when I fruitlessly submitted comic strip ideas to newspaper syndicates, I made up a rule that if the text for a daily strip didn't fit on a 3-by-5-inch index card, it was too wordy. That worked pretty well. I wrote both Mom's Cancer and WHTTWOT as pages of script accompanied by doodles and thumbnail sketches that captured the visuals I imagined--the screenplay for the movie playing in my head. Then I cut.

Not everyone works that way. Some find inspiration in starting with the drawing, brainstorming visually and then building a story from that. Although an image sometimes comes to me full-blown, I usually start with words and then consciously seek opportunities for pictures to take their place, add meaning, and carry as much of the narrative load as possible. A graphic novel should be more than an illustrated prose novel. In my ideal graphic novel, both the words and art convey equal meaning and neither is complete without the other.

For example, in Mom's Cancer I wrote about the ordeal of managing Mom's many medications (pp. 59-61). In my first-draft script, I'd written something about it being like "walking a tightrope." Now, aside from that being a lazy, obvious simile I didn't like, I couldn't figure out how to illustrate it. What do you draw, Mom sitting around taking medications? Rows of pill bottles? Boring. I wanted to capture the precarious uncertainty of this experience and, at the same time, fix the clunky metaphor. My solution was to draw the metaphor: The pictures show Mom actually walking on a tightrope surrounded by danger while everything goes wrong around her, freeing the words from having to mention it at all. It also gave me a chance to play some absurd dark humor against Mom's grim situation. Cartooningwise, I was very satisified with how this bit turned out.

I looked for similar opportunities in WHTTWOT. I'm very aware of how my words and pictures balance, and which is pulling more weight through different passages. For example, the first chapter of WHTTWOT is exposition-heavy, so I deliberately followed it with a chapter that's almost pantomime with hardly any text at all. My aim was to give readers a break and exercise a different part of their brains that interprets visual rather than verbal information. The last chapter is again light on words and heavy on visuals, which reads quicker and I hope creates some momentum that pulls readers through. In addition, as the book nears the end, each page provides less visual information than the page before, prodding readers to pick up their pace as they barrel toward what I hope is a satisfying climax.

That's how I'm trying to manipulate you, anyway. Don't know if I pulled it off.

Historical Research
The story of Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? covers more than three decades, from the late 1930s to the mid 1970s (plus a bit beyond). This raised a problem I'd never really dealt with before: doing historical research for a graphic novel.

Both the beauty and horror of writing a graphic novel is that nothing gets on the page by accident. If there's a person, car, rock, tree, trash can, or blade of grass in the picture, it's there because I wanted it there. This turns out to be a significant challenge when you go back in time. I struggled mightily to leave all my modern preconceptions behind and find references for everything I could. My characters drink soda pop in 1939; what shape and size were soda bottles then? What did a street light look like in 1945? When did kids start wearing high-top sneakers? What day and time did a particular TV show air, and what phase was the Moon in that day?

I collected probably a couple thousand pages of reference and read hundreds of pages more. I discovered that one problem with trying to get it right (and being terrified of getting it wrong) is potential paralysis: being afraid to do anything for fear that it isn't perfect. Eventually, I just figured I'd have to live with getting the big stuff as right as possible and minimize the risk of flubbing the small stuff as best I could. After absorbing all the research I could manage, I had to kind of relax, let it go, and just start to draw.

I tried to be thoughtful about my sources. For example, researching period clothing yields a lot of old magazine fashion spreads. But everyday people don't dress like fashion models then or now. Better are actual news or candid photos of the time showing real people living real lives. It's also tempting to look up "1945 automobiles" or "1965 business suits" and use the first examples you find. But nobody buys a new car and wardrobe every year. People drive 10-year-old cars and wear 5-year-old clothes. Few houses have all-new furnishings; right now in my living room I've got a 10-year-old couch and a 90-year-old phonograph. The people and places I draw should look that real and lived in.

Two examples of how that works in WHTTWOT: One panel is a big overhead shot of a kid's bedroom in 1965. Now, kid's bedrooms are often furnished with family hand-me-downs, so when I put a radio near the kid's bed I made it a small tube-powered model built in the mid 1950s (the same one I have in my bedroom passed down from my father-in-law). A chair in the corner of the kid's room--you know, that extra chair that doesn't fit around the dining room table so you stash it in the bedroom--is from a set made in the 1950s.

Also in the 1965 chapter, I put my characters in a '57 Chevy. That was a risk. First, as I've written before, I don't draw cars well, nor do I enjoy it. Not sure what I was thinking when I scripted a road trip. Second, the '57 Chevy is an all-time great classic car with legions of fans who know every bolt. (Digression: I was recently admiring a '57 Chevy in a parking lot when my wife Karen remarked that she'd had a friend in high school who'd owned one. "Oh, was he a classic car guy?" I innocently asked. "Not really," she answered. "Back then it wasn't really classic. It was just old." Ouch. Since Karen is younger than I am, I instantly felt positively antique.)

Despite the peril, I had both practical and creative reasons for picking the '57 Chevy. Practically, it was easy to find a good toy model and tons of reference photos for it (period photos only, since modern examples of the car often have subtle modifications I wouldn't want to accidentally include). Creatively, the car is strongly evocative of its time. And putting my 1965 characters in a 1957 Chevy said something about them: they had an eye for style and couldn't afford a newer car. They're middle or lower-middle class; an 8-year-old car is the best they could do, but they picked a good one.

I don't know if any of this will come across to the reader. I suspect not, but hope it accumulates into a kind of verisimilitude that makes the world of WHTTWOT seem more real than if I hadn't gone to the effort and just made it all up. I'm also positive that as soon as the book comes out I'll start hearing from readers telling me what I got wrong. I expect to know the anguish experienced by Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier when he discovered he'd had his Civil-War-era hero eat a variety of apple that hadn't been hybridized yet.

All I can answer is that I honestly did my best and if I tried any harder I wouldn't have been able to produce the book at all.

It's Quiet. TOO Quiet.

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It's been quiet here at the Fies Files lately--a combination of more work than I have time to do and a lack of ideas to blab--sorry, blog--about. That'll be true for a while longer but not permanently. I'll be back sharing my uninformed opinions and baseless expertise in no time. Meanwhile, I am getting some good writing done, both boring day-job writing that pays the bills and pulse-pounding graphic novel writing that doesn't.

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I was thinking of rerunning some old posts that seem to attract the most web searches, which may or not mean the same thing as "popular." They tend to be those that dig into the nuts and bolts of making comics. I'll see if I can cull some of them, and maybe some personal favorites, in the next few days. After all, I can count the number of people who've read my blog from the beginning without taking off my shoes, and a rerun's not a rerun if you've never seen it before.

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Thanks for checking in from time to time, I appreciate it.

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Lance Armstrong and I are Tight

The big AMGEN Tour of California bicycle race, whose prestige has grown in its few years of existence to make it one of the world's great biking events, completed its second stage in my hometown of Santa Rosa yesterday. Everyone made quite a big whoop-de-do about it, and enthusiastic crowds were huge despite light rain.

Unfortunately, that's not where I was. Instead, life took me to the Central Valley college town of Davis yesterday--where, coincidentally, the day's race began. And while I don't follow or really care much about the sport of cycling, when the circus comes to town and you have a chance to see the best at anything doing what they do, I think you take it. Which is how my girls and I ended up standing on a Davis boulevard about a mile downstream from the race's starting line.



My daughter Robin shot the video. Somewhere in there--I've no idea where--are Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, and another couple dozen of the most elite biking athletes in the world. You can hear me laughing about halfway through the video. That's because we'd spent several minutes devising our photography strategy, which the race itself destroyed in an instant. Somehow I'd pictured more racers more spread out. Instead, this tight little scrum blew by us in about two seconds. I thought I'd have time to shoot five or six photos. Instead, with the brief delay my digital camera takes to process each image, I had time for three: coming, whooshing past in a blur, and going.

If my schedule had cooperated, it would've been possible for me to see the start of the race in Davis and then drive home to catch its finish. That's not how my day went. But I'm glad we took the trouble to check it out. It was the most fun two seconds I can remember having in quite a while.

Frank Frazetta

Fantasy and comics artist Frank Frazetta died today. I never met Mr. Frazetta, and was a casual fan in the way that most who grew up reading comics were fans, which is to say I have huge respect but was never an expert or student of his work. I understand why his art is so beloved--one of his original paintings recently sold for $1 million--but I also understand the criticism that, for all his technical mastery, Mr. Frazetta's work remained more illustration than fine art and never really transcended its vulgar pulpy roots.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Despite my tepid veneration, I wanted to note Mr. Frazetta's passing by talking about one piece of his that knocked my socks off when I first saw it as a kid, established my personal gold standard for how good comic art could be, and is a little different from all the images that'll be illustrating his obit in the next few days (like the one above). This was a black-and-white drawing originally done for the cover of a Buck Rogers comic book in 1954:

Click the pic to embiggen it.

Wow! Here's some of what I think is going on in this drawing of an alien taking aim at our heroes Wilma and Buck (scholars of Frazetta or the comic-book arts are welcome to correct me). I believe the original is ink on duoshade board, which was a type of heavy paper printed with fine hatching and cross-hatching that only became visible when the artist brushed chemicals on them--one chemical for light shading, another for dark. It was made until very recently, I've played with it myself. Everything that appears brown in this image is light or dark duoshade lines that would've looked gray in print.

This drawing is perfect. Perfect composition; the action is clear, the moment dramatic. Great mix of textures: the shiny smooth ship against the organic veiny hairiness of the alien against the rough rockiness of the Moon against the graceful wisps of nebula floating through distant space. Terrific use of light and shadow. I love the lunar craters and mares, defined not by outlines but by shadows. It's no coincidence that one bright swath of lunar highlands intersects the alien's head, while another points right to Buck's. White against gray against black, all organized to lead the reader's eye to the moment of conflict, where the pure black-on-white starburst on Buck's helmet makes the perfect target for the villain's gun.

Nearly every line in the alien's body, right down to the alignment of the buttons on his blouse, guides your attention to his (and Frazetta's) target: the head of Buck Rogers.

In addition, Frazetta perfectly balances the triangular shapes defined by the alien and the spaceship itself against the huge circle of the Moon, the circular dome of Buck's cockpit, and the smaller ovals that mark the back of the ship and the eddies in the nebula. That little point of the right wing that protrudes past the edge of the Moon's disk is important: it firmly establishes our little ship in space and, along with the intersecting nebula below it, "hooks" our eye and keeps it from following the arc of the Moon right off the edge of the page. I could go on.

Frazetta will be most remembered for his lush, lurid, fleshy, full-color paintings of barbarian warriors, savage beasts, and voluptuous princesses, and rightly so. But it's his early black-and-white comics work--influenced by Foster and Raymond, inked by Wood--that hit me young and took my breath away. That was really great stuff.

Despite the fact that hundreds of artists have built careers copying Frank Frazetta's style, none has come close to surpassing him. He was one of a kind.

Huffington Post Remembers Mom's Cancer for Mother's Day

This is really nice.

Publisher Lena Tabori put together a list of her seven favorite mother-themed books "as a mom and a publisher" for the popular Huffington Post site. One of them is Mom's Cancer.

Tabori writes: "In 116 simple and touching pages, he draws and tells the story of his mother's struggle with lung cancer (and ultimate triumph) and the parts played by he and his two sisters. It is oddly an American everyman's story of doctors and hospitals and denial and determination and hope. Strangely reassuring."

I think that's so terrific I won't even dispute Tabori's description of Editor Charlie as "brilliant" and "young." Many thanks to her and the Huffington Post for making this Mother's Day a bit more meaningful to me. Mom would've been thrilled.
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Once Upon a Time There Was a Boy Who Lived in the Desert

Never got around to watching the first three (that is, the real first three) "Star Wars" movies? I gotcha covered.

Postcard from Matamata

Google Alerts are strange and wonderful things. Scanning the web for key words and phrases--in my case, "Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow"--wherever they turn up, the alerts often unearth odd little jewels from other lands or the distant past.

Today, my Google Alert netted me an October 2009 blog post from the Matamata Public Library in New Zealand. Describing the library's collection of graphic novels, librarian Nick called WHTTWOT "an example of a graphic novel which isn't just a novel in comic form but a serious piece of writing which has depth and entertainment." The library has also included my book in a short list of "favourite books" on its site's sidebar.

Matamata is a community in northern New Zealand of about 12,000--6,000 in the township itself and another 6,000 on surrounding farmland. I'm delighted to learn that the area's bucolic beauty earned it a role as Hobbiton, verdant village of the Hobbits, in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies. I'd love to visit it someday . . . maybe stop by the library while I'm in the neighborhood.

I've written before about how publishing a book feels kind of like raising a child and sending it out into the world, never knowing quite where it's going, what it's up to, or what sort of riff-raff it's associating with. Once in a while you get a cryptic postcard: a note from a reader, a brief review. This postcard, mailed half a year ago and postmarked Matamata, is one of the neater ones I've received. If anyone from the Matamata Public Library finds this (maybe via Google Alert?), thanks.

Beautiful Matamata: land of Hobbits and librarians who like my book.

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Sketchy Fan Appreciation

Because I am the King of Multimedia, I set up a Facebook Fan Page for WHTTWOT several months ago (I also have a personal Facebook page if you want to be my pretend friend; I'm not picky). Anyone on Facebook who likes the book is welcome to sign up. I myself am a fan of the Charles Schulz Museum, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie, Stephan Pastis, the Hubble Space Telescope and a few other things, including my own book.

A couple of weeks ago, WHTTWOT got its 100th Facebook Fan. Hooray! To mark the milestone and say thanks, I offered a free character sketch to anyone who asked for one by the next day. Any character--preferably one of mine, but not necessarily. The offer was time-limited as kind of a reward for paying attention and, frankly, because I really didn't want to do 100-plus drawings. I expected anywhere between 1 and 99 requests and ended up mailing out 18, which was a good number.

The drawings are about 4 x 6 inches, done with the same brushes, pens, ink, and paper I use for my real cartooning. In fact, although I called them "sketches," they wound up being pretty near finished art. Turns out my drawing motor only has one speed, unfortunately for me. But I really enjoyed doing these and the recipients who've gotten back to me seem happy with them. If you're not happy with your sketch, just remember what you paid for it.

A few examples are below. All the sketches (except one I forgot to scan before I mailed) are posted in the WHTTWOT Fan Page's photo album. Just click on a picture to make it bigger and read the notes.

This was fun! All my gratitude and appreciation to people who've read, liked and supported both WHTTWOT and Mom's Cancer, it means a lot to me.

Cap Crater for Philipp. The astounding thing about this drawing is that the post office delivered it to Austria in three days. Talk about the futuristic World of Tomorrow, that's amazing!

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Valerie asked for Axis Ape, who appeared in exactly one panel of WHTTWOT. Great request!

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Kid Sis for Susan, who was the kid sis in her family.

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Dr. Xandra for Jim, who's studying to become an actual rocket scientist. Not an evil one, I hope.

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Brian asked for a drawing of Buddy, representing himself as a boy, reading Popular Science with his cat Flash looking over his shoulder.

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Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century for Charles, who collects duck art. I thought of the subject myself.

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Me, for my college buddy Tina, who knew me when.

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Thanks again.

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Man of Letters

I thought I'd do a post on lettering, seeing as how I've been nominated for an Eisner Award for it and all. I've touched on the topic before, but it's been quite a while and I've learned a bit since last time.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a professional letterer! I have a lot of respect for those who are. I don't know if everything below is optimal or even right. If you want to tap the brain of a master, go visit Todd Klein. This post is just based on my experience, the lessons I've learned and mistakes I've made. I get by.

Lettering in comics is important, and too often overlooked or an afterthought. Neat, legible lettering can make the difference between work that looks like that of a novice or a pro. Where the words are placed on the page is critical--absolutely critical--to how the reader's eye is guided through the action. It can control pace and convey urgency, confusion, anger, and other moods and emotions.

It can also reveal something about a character. Some of the smartest lettering in comics was done for Walt Kelly's "Pogo," where a deacon spoke in ornate Gothic script and a showman pattered in circus-poster bluster. A more subtle example is Marvel Comics' character The Vision, an android who often spoke in rectangular yellow word balloons to suggest an eerie mechanical voice different from everyone else's.

Pogo's P.T. Bridgeport sounds like W.C. Fields to me.

The spooky-voiced Vision (right) versus . . . Captain Space Pirate Zombie? I read this one long ago but don't remember.

Lettering serves different purposes in different types of comics. The slickest, cleanest, most professional lettering tends to show up in mainstream comic books and some comic strips--you might think of them as the more "corporate" or studio-produced products. It serves its purpose of telling the story without calling attention to itself; when it's done right, no one notices. In contrast, comics produced by a single creative vision often have unique, idiosyncratic lettering, usually that of the auteur him/herself. The lettering of Charles Schulz and Robert Crumb is instantly recognizable and as integral to their work as their words and pictures.

A person's handwriting is an intimate thing--think how much more a handwritten note means than an e-mail, or how an unexpected glimpse of grandma's graceful cursive can conjure powerful memories. Lettering gives a story a voice and personality. As a cartoonist, it's worth putting some thought and effort into.

In Which We Learn by Fumbling
Until recently in comics history, lettering was always done directly on the paper the art was drawn on, and was the first ink to hit the paper. Lettering first, to make sure it was placed right and had enough room, then art. Many cartoonists still work that way, but increasingly the lettering is done digitally and placed after the art is complete. I've done both.

On Mom's Cancer, I lettered directly on the page, just how it looks in print. I lightly pencilled guidelines onto the paper, with the space between lines of text half as high as the letters themselves (e.g., letters 6 mm high with 3 mm line spacing ("leading") between). How large you actually make your letters depends on the size of your original and published art, whether for print or web; that'll take some trial and error. Easy legibility is the goal. Take into account the fact that some readers may have worse eyesight than you and err on the side of writing too big. Fat, wide letters read better than thin, crowded ones.

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Hand lettering should have a nice, relaxed flow to it, not look too fussy and cramped. You can fall into a very pleasant rhythmic groove while lettering. Find a pen that gives you the look you want. For example, some of the best letterers use calligraphy-style flat nibs that vary their line width depending on the angle of the stroke. They take a lot of practice but can look great. I've always preferred a uniform line weight for my letters, and so used Speedball nibs B-5 and B-6, which have a round tip. I enjoyed the look, feel, and ritual of dipping a pen in ink but you could also use a fountain pen or even a dark, permanent felt-tip.

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I love the authenticity and hand-crafted quality of lettering by hand. But here's what happened as a result: If I needed to correct something, I either whited out the original and relettered, or lettered the fix on a separate piece of paper and pasted it on (at first physically, later digitally). When we got around to preparing Mom's Cancer for print, my editor made some edits; more relettering and pasting. If we wanted to shrink or delete a word balloon, I had to redraw the art around it to fit. Later, when it came time to translate Mom's Cancer into other languages, I had to digitally erase all the lettering so the translators could fit new text into the existing balloons (which, depending on the language, may have been too large or small). In general, changing anything was a huge chore.

None of that was efficient or fun. As much as I love and respect old-timey ink on paper, I decided to march boldly into the 21st century (or at least tiptoe warily into the late 20th) and letter digitally. But I still wanted my lettering to be un-sterile and reflect me as much as possible. So I set out to convert my own handprinting into a computer font.

Rise of the Machines

Now, there are websites that will do that cheaply or free. You print your letters on a template, scan it, upload it, and a few minutes later they'll send you a font ready to install on your computer. I tried that and found the results inadequate. The resolution and quality were poor, as was the kerning (more on that in a sec). It might have been fun for sending notes to family but wasn't good enough for professional work. Your mileage may vary.

On the recommendation of a cartooning friend, I purchased a program called FontCreator. This isn't a plug, there are competing products that might be as good or better. But FontCreator could do everything I wanted plus a ton of things I didn't want or even understand. It's overpowered for my needs. I wanted a Hyundai and got a Ferrari. Still, it wasn't hard to figure out the basics. Using letters sampled from Mom's Cancer, I had a pretty good digital font up and running in a day.

Something To Think About #1: Fonts have upper- and lower-case letters. Comics are generally lettered in all upper-case. What to do with the lower-case letters you don't need? Make them upper-case, too, so that you have two versions of every letter. Especially when a letter repeats, making them slightly different subtly softens the mechanical perfection of digital.

How this works: in my custom font, upper- and lower-case letters are both represented as capitals penned slightly differently, which breaks up the monotonous regularity of digital type.

Note the "I" in the middle of that anguished cry above. It's sorta important. One of the conventions of comics lettering is that the "I" has serifs (the little horizontal lines at top and bottom) when it refers to oneself and doesn't when it's part of a word. So the "I" in "I," "I'd," "I've," etc. should have serifs, while the "I" in "serifs" shouldn't. Take a look back up at that panel of the Vision vs. Captain Space Pirate Zombie and the words "I must admit." See? So in my handmade font I made my capital "I" with serifs and my lower-case "i" without. Sadly, this is a fine point of craft that more and more people who make a living slinging letters don't seem to know anymore.

To write this in my font, I typed "I like ice."

Something to Think About #2: Kerning, or how your letters are squished together. Letters have different shapes and need different amounts of elbow room. Letters like "T" and "V" are top-heavy; letters like "A" and "L" are bottom-heavy. Kerning is the art (and it is an art) of overlapping differently shaped letters so they look good together.

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For example, the top "A" and "V" below aren't kerned at all. You could draw a vertical line straight through the voluminous void between those letters. In contrast, the bottom "AV" is kerned; the bottom right of the "A" slides under the top left of the "V" so they overlap and fill each other's white space a bit.

You can see the impact of kerning in a word like "AVATAR." The top example below has no kerning and there's too much air around the "V" and "T." The middle example has, I think, a nice amount of kerning. One of the loopier reviews I read of James Cameron's "Avatar" movie criticized the poor kerning of its poster font, at bottom. Curiously, the letter that looks most out of whack to me is the "R," which seems to be a light-year away from its "A." I guess when you earn a billion dollars you can kern any way you want.

You build kerning into a digital font by going through every two-letter combination likely to need it and defining how much space you want between them. This is hard--doubly so when your font has two versions of every letter and they're handprinted, which means you can't blindly apply the same kerning to every pair. Keeping in mind that my lower-case letters appear as upper-case, "AV," "Av," "aV," and "av" all require separate adjustments. Then there are the many permutations of VA, AT, TA, LT, LV, PA, etc. As I work with my font I continue to discover new combinations of letters that need work and send me back under the hood to tweak.

So I used my custom digital font in Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow. Here's what happened as a result: If I needed to edit my text, I opened the file in Photoshop and revised it in a few seconds. If I needed to expand or delete it: done in less than a minute. If I needed to prepare my pages for translation into other languages: my letters and word balloons were already on separate Photoshop layers, so all they had to do was delete my text layer with one click and substitute their own.

I'm not saying you should letter digitally. Your needs, skills, priorities, talents, and logorrhea are different than mine. I'm saying that with the type of work I do--say, writing a 200-page graphic novel that'll pass through two or three editors and has the potential for foreign publication--it would be an insane waste of my time not to. There are trade-offs; I think they're worth it.

As I described a couple of weeks ago, I used three main fonts in WHTTWOT, plus a bunch of fonts meant to evoke era-appropriate indicia, ads, signs and such. Most of the book is lettered in my handprinted font because it's a conversation between me and the reader. You and I are talking here. I used a much slicker professional font for the "Space Age Adventures" comic books within the comic book, and a third font that I thought kind of combined the aesthetics of the other two--formal but relaxed, with lower-case letters--for the final chapter, where the threads come together. I put a lot of thought into how lettering could convey meaning in ways the reader wouldn't be consciously aware of. To the extent I succeeded, I was happy with the result. To the extent I fell short, well . . . I know I have a lot to learn.

Oh, final piece of advice. Don't use Comic Sans. Just don't.
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